Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

When you work in an organization that historically lacks accountability for following processes, you can get thrown for a loop when processes are all of a sudden enforced.  It is easy to say that leaders and managers need to hold people accountable to the processes that matter.  Accountability leads to consistency.  Consistency leads to reliability.  However, when the inmates have run the asylum for a while, accountability is going to meet resistance head on. As much as people want to follow a process, they also want their autonomy too. Once everyone decides they want to institute and enforce a process, that autonomy is taken away.  And now instead of inmates running the asylum to get things done, we end up in complete organizational standstill.  Managers try to enforce new processes. Everybody else is figuring out ways to get around the processes because that's how to get things done.  Before you decide to institute a culture of pr...

Why is this so hard? And the follow up question - Why is this taking so long?  Make a peanut butter sandwich. 30 seconds.  Walk to and eat lunch. 1 hour.  Draft a project plan. 2 hours. With enough experience you become very good at estimating the time it takes to do basic things.  Enter into a large corporation.  Process a service request. Days.  Schedule a meeting. Weeks.  Build something in IT. Years. The successful manager is the one that can cut through the organization to get things done. Unfortunately, it's hard to get through the bureaucracy without getting some battle wounds and scars along the way.